


Sundown

by Albrecht_Starkarm



Category: Black Lagoon (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Child Abuse, Cruelty, Living Nightmares, Other, Psychosis, Religion, Vacation in Hell, extreme violence, vengeance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-08 01:18:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21227411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albrecht_Starkarm/pseuds/Albrecht_Starkarm
Summary: Man has abandoned God in Roanapur, but that's fine.  God abandoned man first.  Hell on earth is still closer to heaven than anywhere else, and the only difference between a demon and an angel is the clothes.Revy knows it.  And Rock is gonna learn.





	Sundown

**Author's Note:**

> As always, if humanity being human pisses you off, sends you into apoplexy, or makes you write letters to the editor, stop reading.
> 
> Or better yet, keep reading.

Who woulda thought the guy would go all born-again? You see a Jap, you don't usually expect they're gonna go freaky Christian on you. Hell, I woulda thought he'd go Jew first. He was always good with money. But there you were. Even Dutch could barely believe it, and I was pretty sure Dutch was at least clinging to the last few rungs of all that Christian shit. Maybe not the charity or the piety but just the believing. It's the believing always goes last.

I know what I'm talking about. But I stood there, listened to him, listened to the soft hot prayers muttering like all the supplicants out at the Ripoff Church, dumbasses who really think they've got a line up to the Big Guy upstairs. But at least he didn't think you could get a leg-up with a middleman in a goofy costume that must've been hot shit around the fifteenth century.

He just prayed. And prayed. On his knees, palms clasped together, rocking back and forth like some of those Muslims I'd seen before. It looked stupid, wearing out your knees like that, but hell they weren't my pants. Far as I knew, maybe he'd learned it from a Muslim somewhere. There's a shitload of 'em here.

You'd think a place like this, hell in the tropics, you wouldn't find a single Pious True Believer or whatever, but maybe that's the wrong way of thinking about it. Maybe it's all wrong and the only way you find real communion with whatever you're looking for is in hell. Or maybe I'm just too fuckin' lost, fallen, whatever to have any idea what it means.

Like Ibrahim. Now _that_ was a weird motherfucker. You want to find _fanatic_, don't look in the dictionary. Just look up Ibrahim. A fuckin' Quran-thumper like you couldn't believe. Always dragging himself out of sleep to the canned muezzin screaming like the most melodious goat-fucking I'd ever heard before, and it'd echo around the old neighborhood, pissed off chinks with their beady angry eyes burning like candles out of every window but everybody too scared and too meek to say shit.

That's what the chinks were like. Like my old man. Motherfucker wouldn't say shit to his boss, to the thugs making him dance the fuckin' boogaloo or whatever for a fistful of dirty crumpled bills every day he'd promptly blow on some rotgut as amnesia and anesthesia in the same mouthful. But mom before she left, she'd be the one to get his fists.

And then _I'd_ get 'em once mom was gone. I didn't blame her. Just like any fuckin' weak bitch, she slunk out the door one afternoon when I sat there, a stupid fucking eleven-year-old, still snot-nosed, still on my knees and praying the way Ibrahim had taught me. He didn't try to convert me to Islam or anything.

He said something like _Dhimmi are dhimmi, and you are dhimmi. You are a Christian. I will teach you about Christianity unless you want to learn about Islam._

I didn't know what it was. All I knew was mom was Christian, and I guessed that made _me_ a Christian, and that was still the age when you looked up at your parents and maybe it was just the height or maybe it was biology and the awe it gives you through the blood like some psychic gonorrhea and you can't see anything lucidly enough to know it's all bullshit and all they've ever done for you is drag you screaming through a spasm of blood and hunger into this world.

I wasn't wanted. They made that pretty goddamned clear in the first little pinpricks of memory I got knocking around in my head. Hearing the screaming, _Shut up that little motherfucker, or she goes out the window, cunt._

Or, y'know, mom holding me to her big soft tit, mouth wrapped around a nipple, and God knew why- Christ, I still think of God as God instead of, like, god, or something else- but I could hear and I already knew all the words chiming out of her mouth in that soft melodious chinglish, _Oh, Rebecca, I wish you not born, __your papa he moguī you moguī too but you living, I have take care of you._

Far as I knew, maybe she didn't really speak Chinese and didn't speak English, either, but she was just lost in a limbo between them and didn't have the words for all the thoughts she had burning their big raw cigarette stains behind her eyes.

I didn't know shit about mom 'cept she was pretty, and I guess I got that. You look in the mirror, you see what you got. And you hear assholes talk about you, you hear the split images start to converge, overlap, and I can see parts of my mom there. Dad was a halfer and he was always on the edges, some pathetic little moon around the big motherfuckers in the neighborhood.

Always heard one goddamned word all the time from dad's rubbery mouth and everybody else on the street. _Hunxue'er_. Halfer. Fucking half-breed and that's what I was, too. Quarter. Or three-quarters chink. Whatever. Chinks are like that. They're a tribe and if you're not totally part of the tribe, it don't goddamn matter what it is you do.

You're fucked.

Ibrahim didn't care. The guy looked like Dutch, except Arab or something, big motherfucker with sandy-brown skin and cold black eyes always behind a pair of sunglasses he had on the nose looked like a knife jutting out of his face and his fists were fast and Ibrahim was even faster with a gun. He'd been some kinda killer commando back in Iraq or something and he was fucking finished with all of it.

Only guy I knew in the neighborhood the chinks were afraid of. They'd give him a big berth, wouldn't say shit to him. It was smart. Once, I saw these six 'roided-up half-wits try to jump him, and it looked like a slow-motion hurricane. No. Wasn't even that. It was just, Ibrahim was moving normal, but everybody else was wearing lead boots and cement clothes, and his fists went into people's necks, slammed their temples in, and then he took down this one fucker just wrapping his arms around his throat, squeezing 'til the eyes turned into a frog's and popped out and he was wheezing and struggling and Ibrahim let him drop.

Six seconds. Tops. Ibrahim was just pissed because they'd made him act with violence. He'd caught me once jimmying open a mailbox outside his building and I felt the world turn on its side when his thousand-pound hand clapped on my shoulder, his voice thick and soft and Ibrahim never shouted.

Just, _What do you think you're doing, young lady? Forgotten your key and only had a crowbar on-hand?_

He laughed. Ibrahim was a guy who laughed at the stupidest shit because it was funny to him, and he didn't care about anything else. Pulled me into his building's lobby through the wide dirty glass doors with a hard _clang_ and the super who was some old chinaman looked like he could've been the Qing emperor's older brother or something shriveled pinch-faced nothing with a mouth like a chicken's asshole, he just gave us both this little look and I didn't know what was going to happen but I was scared to death.

I was sure this was it. I'd heard nasty shit about Ibrahim, about all them aye-rabs, how they're all diaper-snipers and whatever and an eleven-year-old might not be in diapers but close enough, right? I was begging, cajoling, negotiating, all the stages of grief or whatever, and Ibrahim said nothing. Clumped his big Frankenstein's monster feet over the filthy black-scuffed tiles with their schizoid schmierkunst and was totally quiet and then heard his boots rustling down a hallway made out of threadbare carpet like an old man's hair and walls greasy with about ten thousand junkie shoulders rasping down what might've been white once and looked like a six-pack-a-day smoker's teeth and under water-yellowed ceilings with dead fire alarms and the sunken lonely eyes of long-forgotten light fixtures.

He pulled me into an apartment I was sure would be festooned with rotting guts as fun tinsel but instead it was cleaner than should've been possible in a place whose air turned everything to shit. It was perfect and had neatly-interlocked parquet floors and they were polished and the walls shone white and these weird Islamic mosaics decorated the walls and he'd even painted them on the ceiling.

I could tell because they were great but still looked like art. Still had these little imperfections, wabisabi shit. An unsteady hand and I could see the huge guy on his back on some teetering scaffold maybe just a board between two ladders, paint dripping back down at him, cool oasis blue against a sterile blasted white desert.

Light gushed through the door and I was half-blind and Ibrahim closed the door with a hard _crunch_ and I was sure I'd hear about fifty billion latches clicking and clattering chains but instead he didn't do shit. Just pulled off his huge boots and tucked them neatly next to the door and said, Take off your shoes.

Are you hungry?

Was I fucking hungry? But it made sense, I guess. He had this weird simplicity about him. If you're a thief, it must mean you're hungry. If you don't believe in Allah, it means you're ignorant. Simple things. Put things in their right order, right place, and if they drift then you know something's wrong.

He asked me: Are you a Muslim?

Nah. No way. I don't know what the fuck it means.

Are you a Christian?

A sniffly snot-nosed brat, grind the back of my hand at my snout, still aching from dad's fist the last night and eyes haloed in black and starting to turn purple with yellow streaks like a banana rotting in reverse, and I just said some shit like, I dunno. I guess my mom's a Christian or something.

Hear her talking about God and Jesus all the time.

Then you're _dhimmi_. One of the people of the book. You are welcome at my table. Shit like that. Two huge-ass swords glowing like metal death on the wall with an AK between them and I was sure it wasn't just to look nice.

Ibrahim had heaps of guns in his place. I didn't know what he did with 'em. Sometimes new ones would come in, and the old ones would leave. But he had me pad into the kitchen with him, 'cause this was a little better than our shitty tenement opening right up into the kitchen, and it looked nothing like our place.

There were immaculate brown-upholstered chairs and a wide sofa and soft pillowy cushions on the floor and beaded curtains clicking in the door frames and the kitchen was like the bathroom with this nice clean scent of bleach and disinfectant and he said: You look hungry. You are too skinny. What is your name?

Just like that.

They call me Becky. I was Becky then. Rebecca. Whatever.

Mmm. Okay. They call me Ibrahim. Only Ibrahim. I am abd-Allah, a slave of Allah, but no man, and no family. Call me Ibrahim.

So I called him Ibrahim. Plowed into a huge plate of rice with chicken and ground lamb and nuts and shit and then finished what I was pretty sure was a pound of roasted chicken and Ibrahim just laughed instead of telling me I was a disgusting goddamned pig, what was I doing, eating so fucking much?

Bread and a glass of juice and Ibrahim did nothing but sit there and watch before he pinched his fingers around my chin and I was sure, Oh, shit, now it's coming.

But I just heard: Who did this to you, Rebecca?

I shut up. And he didn't push it. But he told me his door was always open, I needed a place to stay. A refuge. That was how he called it.

Says everything that was the door I haunted when I stumbled back to the neighborhood through the slanting hard rain and screaming wind and everything thudding in my ears blood leaking down my thighs and the world starting to turn black and I didn't goddamned know where I was, but it was just some homing instinct or whatever.

Totally numb, feeling fucking nothing. Just living mostly in that second. Not the past. Like hell; if there's a hell, that's how it smells, at least. Fug of stale foot fungus sickly-sweet and grime and mold and the cold cement floor of a police station with a fat subhuman in blue with his face going red in rut pumping like he's about to have a goddamned coronary wheezing and snorting like a hog before you feel that ugly heat move through you.

And then he's pulling out and laughing about it, dick in his hand and throwing a fistful of dollar bills at me, goddamn chink whores, at least they're tight. Shadows crouched in the corner laughing at me. Wrists pinioned behind my back like a fuckin' trussed chicken and can't even pull up my panties or my jeans with all the other demons stalking around, hunchbacked horrors with their sneering eyes. Laughter ringing around the cell block and the hard metal clang of locks sliding in and out. Roll over on my belly and fuck the ground and just bleed and hope the world will melt away and everyone will die.

It felt like autopilot walking out, stumbling around, finally upending everything in Ibrahim's toilet while he just stood there behind me, bigass shadow, What is the problem, Rebecca, why don't you want to talk about it?

I wanted to scream at him, Fuck you, you goddamn sand-nigger, whaddayou know shit about shit? But I didn't and I said: I want to cry, Ibrahim. But I can't. Big guy nodded like he had all the answers in his head and said, Ah, I understand. I understand.

And pulled off his shirt and I thought: Jesus, now? Where's this bad luck comin' from? But then I really looked and over all the Arnold Schwarzenegger muscle, Christ, that guy wasn't just ripped but shredded and looked like he had about as much bodyfat as a shivering greyhound at the track, there were scars. Scars on scars.

Like those pictures I saw of whipped niggers. Thick scrawling woodcuts. Hard relief against his brown skin and some of them were whitecapped mountains big ranges of dragon shit splattered all over him.

Didn't those hurt, Ibrahim?

I remember the anger and the regret more than the pain. I do not remember the pain at all. The pain will want to leave. Try not to let it leave.

I didn't get it then. All I wanted was the goddamned pain to stop. I was too fuckin' stupid then to know what he was talking about. He was talking about metaphorical shit, pataphysics, and I was just a hungry fifteen-year-old moron probably half-brain-damaged from daddy's fists and fetal alcoholism or whatever and too much weed and what did I know?

But I couldn't cry.

He said it was a tragic thing, a person being unable to cry. But I fell on my knees with him and he said, Let us pray together, Rebecca. Let us pray together.

Is the prayer going to take away the pain, Ibrahim?

No. Prayer invites more pain. Pain is the path to enlightenment. The more pain there is, the more suffering, the truer your knowledge of the world. Allah has given us a world of beauty, but humanity is unworthy of this thing, Rebecca. Not because we are Fallen, not because we have original sin, but because of what and who we are.

Iblis is there to tempt us, to torment us, to drive us away from Allah. But Iblis also brings us the answers and the path back to Allah through doubt. Without doubt, there is no faith, Rebecca. Remember that.

Surety is the enemy of real faith.

All this medieval shit, and there I was, still bleeding, pink gloppy with that motherfucker's jizz, and all I wanted was for it to stop. I wanted peace and suddenly there was this answer hitting me like the cold neon light outside from all the gaudy chinatown shit had stopped, had died, and there was this perfect hard clarity and it hit me like a fucking meteor.

I'm never gonna know peace.

It was like the mosaics on the ceiling were swimming around and it felt like I was high but I wasn't, I was totally fucking sober, on my knees and not on my back, Ibrahim's gigantic hands folding around mine, hot and crushing, and we both stared up at the ceiling and I was mouthing these prayers he'd taught me, Christian prayers, 'cause all Muslims are big Christ-lovers or at least most of 'em or maybe just the ones Ibrahim knew, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, so give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as...

And it stuck in my throat. All this tingling, like an angel's fingernails brushed down the nape of my neck, and I wanted to finish the Lord's Prayer. But I couldn't because it kept gumming in my mouth, and my brain didn't want to spit it up.

Forgive us our trespasses, as...

As...

But there was nothin' there. An empty vault moaning with the wind and all full of dust and suddenly _I_ was all full of dust. And I just let my hands drop and the sky stopped whirling and the mosaics turned bright impossible red and dripped blood on my face and I was telling Ibrahim: I can't do this shit anymore.

Something's different. Something's different in me.

He didn't say shit. Just stood up, and he was so fucking tall I was always sure he'd scrape the ceiling. And he lifted up his hands to the sky like all the Muslims do, y'know, Allah, what is this? What can you do? Allah is up there. We're down here.

He didn't judge me. He said I had myself a choice. A real big fucking choice. I mean, y'know, he didn't say it like that. But it was the message, anyway. I was standing at the divergence of two big paths and he didn't say anything about what the right one was and he didn't tell me if he'd ever been there but I could tell.

All he said was: This is the end. You reach the end before you start your journey. That is the way of the world. It was all metaphysical and shit but I got it 'cause I was scared and shivering and still with rainwater slopping down my face and bleeding but something opened up inside me. Something opened up and there wasn't a voice, wasn't the voice of God or the devil or anything else, but what I heard was: Yes.

Yes.

You can do one thing, or you can do another, but what you're doing right now ain't gonna cut it. You can walk away, or you can plunge back into the shit, but you can't just find a place between them.

It wasn't fair. I wanted to start wailing and gnashing my teeth and rending my garments or however they say it. I wanted to shriek at heaven and say: How is this fucking fair? You can see I was pretty fuckin' naïve back then. It isn't fair.

It isn't fair.

Fairness is what people are born into.

Fairness is just being on the right side of the injustice.

Fairness is having an easy life and saying it's what you deserve because, hell, whatever.

But there was no fairness in squalid Mott Street with the On Leong and the Ghost Shadows and all the other creepy old-world bullshit they'd exported here to the New that was exactly the same, with the same festering old blood under the crust of all the nice shiny modernity, and New York wasn't even new 'cause it'd gone to shit ages ago and all the gritty steel and glass and concrete were built on the bones of the dead and when you slept when you let your eyes close you were swirling through a dreamtime of mobsters in concrete galoshes staring up at you with faces gone to green and blue rot in the filthy brown East River through a scum of used rubbers and old needles swimming with disease and when you stood on street corners and the wind blew past you could feel the stoic anguish of the yen wait and the junk hunger and the circular lusts where the whores lined up waiting for the men in the nice cars and the pushers did, too, to bring them some powdered courage to ply their greasy hungers.

It's the time that turns people into saints or demons and I thought: Hell sounds as warm as Florida.

So I told Ibrahim I couldn't forgive. I felt things slam closed. I couldn't forgive those who had trespassed against me, and he got this sad look pulling down his hard high bones into soft melting wax and he looked like he wanted to cry, but instead he turned around and stalked over to a drawer and sent it clattering open and dredged up this shitty old six-gun.

He said: This is for you, Rebecca. Take it with my lamentation. Never heard anyone say anything like that before. But I got what he meant.

I knew he wanted me to say, Hey, I'll just be a good person. Y'know, leave home, go to school, go to some junior college, Christ, why not be a great law-abiding good Christian girl or convert to Islam and, y'know, marry a doctor or even _be _a doctor, right? 'cause the past can just be the past and maybe it'll hurt, but 's why they made head-shrinkers, right?

But that don't happen in the real world and I think he knew that. It musta been why he had that loaded Saturday night special. Even now, I figure it musta been some kinda test. Maybe Ibrahim was an angel or something, and I failed. Or maybe he was a devil and I did exactly what he wanted.

Whatever it was, it was fuckin' great. I laughed. For the first time in too goddamned long, I laughed. Laughed feeling the weight in my pocket and it felt good. It wasn't bullshit like those NRA freaks. I'm not talkin' about security.

I'm not talkin' about bein' the good guy with a gun. I'm talkin' about being another predator with a fuckin' gun. I'm talkin' about livin' your whole fucking life as a minnow in a school of sharks and suddenly feeling your teeth rip right through your jaws. It was delicious.

Stepping back into the ol' family apartment, feeling like fucking Calamity Jane walking into the Deadwood saloon or whatever. The tenement was a shithole. The usual place they built to warehouse the weird foreign people they didn't wanna see unless they were stooped over cleaning up their shit or serving their tea or breaking their backs in airless mines or on them.

It opened right up into a kitchen. A silent anarchy of dishes like a filthy Krakatoa waiting to go off in a sink that'd gone to rust and dirt like everything else. Every time you stepped, jumped-up cockroaches hissed at you, winked their ugly little eyes at you like you'd just interrupted a business meeting. Rats scurried and clattered and their talons were a little _click-click-click_.

At least the rats were cute. Nothing else was. Old peeling lead paint and there was dear old dad, flopped out on a goddamned couch that'd seen more shit and piss and splooge spilled over it than a two-dollar-a-roll whorehouse's. And what'd I hear?

Where were you, Becky?

What was wrong, Becky?

Becky, are you all right? I was worried sick.

Fuck that. Where's the goddamned booze, you stupid little bitch? I fuckin' tole you ta gimme my goddamn booze. Just fuckin' steal it. I don't got no money. Fuckin' cunt. Never shoulda knocked up your goddamn whore of a mother-

He just lay there, eyes blank, stupid and beady like a teddy bear's, half-open and not even getting what was happening. Suddenly, that little apartment really felt and looked small. I'd never really felt it before. All the time, I'd been suffocating in the place, huddled back in my little room you could probably cross in one long step with my back against the scabrous ripped wallpaper back from a time when Carter was probably in the Oval Office and a hand on my mouth swallowing back the screaming or with fingers between my thighs learning there was something there worth touching, soft and magical and with a big outsized blast of feeling when you quirked that little nub.

Every inch was a fucking mile away from the old bastard.

But suddenly it didn't feel like that anymore. It was just a shitty cramped nothing with ceilings almost falling down over your head and reeking of stale cigarette smoke and old booze and dirty dishes and the filthy sour onion stain of old clothes and the old man was probably the worst.

Lay there, skinny arms and beer gut and half-breed face with the loose red mouth and weird skin like dirty bronze sunken deep in his face and with a few wiry cords of muscle in his arms in an undershirt with armpits the color of a weak drop of old coffee and some old shorts and all I had to do was pick up a pillow, slam it into his face, and then the little Saturday night special followed.

I didn't fuckin' blink. Shut your goddamned mouth, dad.

The sound was so loud I didn't even hear it. Just the backbeat echoing like a throbbing reed off the ceiling. Goddamn, it felt good. And I had to pull away the pillow. I had to see what it did to him. It looked like a giant had slugged him in the head and peeled away a big clod of the skin on his forehead and broken the bone and opened it up like a tin can. You could see the thick black blood splurting out, heart maybe still beating, pumping out some last chaser like pissing in an emptying-out dam.

It was pointless. I liked seeing it. Seeing the red puddling in his empty blank eyes. And, yeah, the feathers coming out of the broken pillow. They looked like an angel's for a second but then they turned black and spotted with red and gummed in the brains and I just walked out. Locked the door behind me.

I woulda burned the goddamn place down, but why fuck up all these poor chinks' lives? I'd already fucked up enough.

I say all of this 'cause I know what it's like to wanna be born again. Except what happened wasn't a rebirth. Thing is, people leave this world the way they come into it: All alone. It's only the pieces between that where you get to be with other people. Most of my life, I was always happy with the idea I'd keep it that way.

It's a cliché, but, Christ, that's how clichés get born. By bein' real. I didn't want anybody with me. Dutch, Benny, they weren't much of a problem. Convenience. Step through the same door with the same people long enough, and you start at least thinking of 'em as fellow travelers. Maybe friends.

But the Jap was a lot different. It's ooey-gooey romance novel bullshit to say stuff like, Oh, I dunno why.

I do know why.

Because he wasn't part of this place and he was never gonna be. He's the kind of dumb asshole you'd see studying his shoes, murmuring at the hookers in their bitch-boots and ripped thigh-highs and reeking of desperation and easy up-front money and the siren's song, _How much for anal?_ like some goddamned freak mating call echoing through the dead red night.

"Hey, Rock?" I'd gotten him a room in the same shit pit I lived in. God knew why. I guess it was thinking it might be easier to keep an eye on him. Or maybe it was 'cause we could just commute to work together or I was pretty sure Dutch wanted me to keep him out of the shit or _something_.

But I'd hear him through the wall sometimes. Muttering his mantra. Mumbling recitations off the bible or just with his prayers half-whispered, _Lord, Mother Mary, please, __will you hear my prayers? Please, listen to me, and change this rotten cruel corrupt world into something..._

Not it ever kept him from doing anything with us. From being one of the fallen. He'd never said shit about it. Still drank and smoked and he still moved guns and drugs and stole and robbed and he might never have killed, but, Jesus, that was just about one of the only sins I'd never seen him commit.

Figured there was always time.

"Rock?" Silence from the room. Everything went quiet. The hallways creaked, ugly and filthy, scattered with big tumbleweeds of trash from the other rooms. The other neighbors were hookers, so the place was usually pretty quiet. No dumbass jumped-up thugs and they all had brands so nobody was fuckin' stupid enough to screw with 'em.

And nobody was stupid enough to try and rob our shit. Irony, right? One of the last places in the world you could leave your door unlocked. Not I was ever dumb enough to try. The water machine bubbled down the stairs with their grimy steps and I listened to the mutant birdsong from the hookers and johns on the street outside and thrumming cars and bigass trucks with their rumbling engines and loping cams slow and predatory and when you opened your ears it was like letting your soul out of your body, plumbing the places you knew so well you could even taste the daily special at Hung's or there was too much garlic like always in that guido Antonio's pasta.

"Rock, goddammit, I know you're there. We're neighbors and the walls are so fuckin' thin I can tell you how big a dump you just took. I'm comin' in-"

"No, Revy. Don't, okay? Don't." I wasn't gonna listen. But I heard him getting up, old floorboards groaning like an old man twisting on the gallows, and that meant he was probably gonna lock the door. So I just pushed my weight into it, slammed it open.

"No, Rock. I'm gonna come in." Pistols in their rigs. Rock's room looked nothing like mine. Yeah, it was still kinda shitty. But more like a sixteen-year-old boy's in suburbia than whatever perfect chaos mine was.

I'm sick. I know I am. But there's something beautiful about a pretty boy with tears in his eyes and he had a lot of 'em. Shirtless with all the sinewy strings of strength up in relief and he'd gotten a deep tan from all the work on the ship, huffing and heaving and panting in his weight belt with Benny and Dutch throwing around heavy shit.

He had a kind of slim and delicate beauty turned into something kinda masculine. Squared-off pecs and compact biceps and iron-hard forearms. I'd seen him do thirty pull-ups, dead lift almost two-fifty.

The lights were off and thin seams of ugly neon burned sallow through his curtains. He'd picked up the place since I was last there and then tossed it again. Musta been the elephant I'd heard crunching around.

The TV spluttered and sparked on the floor. The VCR was still rolling, thirty minutes and a pocketful of seconds, a green blink in the gloom. It smelled like tears and sweat and blood.

He was bleeding from the big tracts in his chest.

"Jesus Christ, Rock-"

"Enough, okay? Get out of here, Revy." Guy didn't even puff up his chest. Just shrunk in his own skin, eyes at his bare feet.

"Fuck that."

"Just _leave_." Wasn't I'd never heard him like that. But it wasn't too often.

"What'd you say, Rock? C'mon. Let's hit the Flag-"

"I don't- I don't wanna fucking drink."

"Fine. Let's go annoy Eda or shit-"

"I don't wanna do _anything_, okay, Revy? Can you just leave me alone? Get the hell out of here." Yeah, I coulda stomped my boots on the floor. Or on his goddamned feet. Belted him across the face and told him never to talk to me like that, you little motherfucker.

But I didn't.

"What were you watching, Rock?" My voice just got real quiet, real firm. Eyes swiveled off to the VCR.

"Nothing-"

"I don't think that's nothin'. What were you watching, Rock?"

"It's nothing."

"Fine. I'll just take it over to my place an' watch it myself. I mean, if it's nothin'-" never expected he'd have his hand on my shoulder.

It was a real dumb thing to do. He knew it, too, 'cause I felt him flinch and the thinking, Shit, do I do this, or not? but then he kept at it.

Clenched.

Pulled me.

So I hit him in the face. What? You expecting Ma Theresa or something? I mean, shit, she stole money outta orphans' mouths and let people wallow in their own shit. I ain't that evil.

Not a slug. Just a backhand, sent him reeling away and his feet were slapping back on the floor, wheeling back and now both hands were on my shoulders.

"Gitcher goddamn hands off me, Rock-"

"Don't. It's- it's not something anybody should see. Don't fucking watch it, Revy. Don't fucking watch it. Don't watch it-"

"What the fuck is it?" So I stopped. Didn't turn. I just listened to him pleading behind me.

"Please. Please, just let it go-"

"No fuckin' way. I heard you praying-"

"So what?"

"So nothin'. I just never heard you goin' all born-again before."

"I'm not a born-again, Revy. I'm just- I'm a Christian, okay? My parents were Christians. I'm not a Buddhist or anything. There are Christians in Japan."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I mean, they were because Christians are _really_ rich." I thought I'd hear him laugh but he didn't. It was just matter-of-fact.

"Fine. Fuck it. Let me go, Rock-"

"Only if you promise you won't watch it."

"Are you gonna be weird if I don't?" Rock said nothing. "You gonna let me go, or is this a massage or some shit, Rock?"

He didn't let me go.

"I don't feel that massage-"

"It's evil, okay? It's just evil."

"Evil's a real strong word."

"It's the right word. It's fucking evil, Revy. It's- you know, before tonight, I just... I always felt it. Around us. Like the stink in the air." He wasn't letting me go. I didn't know what it was, but I liked it. I mean, Christ, don't let me insult your intelligence.

Of course I liked it. We'd been playing the will-they-won't-they game for so fuckin' long my cunt had started growing moss. I liked his hands. How they'd gotten rough and had thick calluses and I liked how they didn't feel like Eda's, how they weren't too delicate but weren't too crude and they didn't have a gun's silhouette in 'em like mine did.

He'd never pulled a trigger before. Never clung hard to a knife even with all the slippery blood spurting out and felt intestines hot like pushing your hands into that old Halloween game of sausages and spaghetti and shit but real and that ain't ketchup. Never shoved harder, harder, heard somebody's guts rip open.

Never felt it come out on your wrists and splatter your shoes.

Never saw what it looks like when you're the one puts the last bullet into somebody's face. He saw that Japanese girl, yeah. That pretty little thing, Yukio, and you wanna know the truth? I felt bad for her. 'cause she saw the same forking path ahead of her like I did and she chose wrong, and she had to live with it, and she went out bad.

She went out like some medieval princess with a thin cord of blood rolling down her wrists and staining her Snow White skin when she jammed that sword into her throat and I was begging for Rock to look away, don't watch, it's not worth it, it's not worth what it's gonna do to you, to your soul, she's not worth it, Rock, Christ, nobody's worth it.

Don't.

But he did.

I'd never seen him just totally go empty like that. That vampire girl, she, y'know, she was already lost. She was a husk, a dead body kept alive by hatred so fierce and so hot the steam kept her arms and legs and even her heart going. She'd had her choice made for her and couldn't pull herself out of it.

Somebody kicked her so far down that path walking back would've been death, too.

But the Washimine girl, she was different. She stood there and that stupid king-sized motherfucker, he coulda dumped the goddamn samurai bullshit and told her: Princess, let's retire to Aruba and live on the beach and fuck every day and drink fruity cocktails out of big glasses packed with ice.

Just like Ibrahim maybe should've told me: Rebecca, don't be stupid. Even if you have to be a secretary, a janitor, stand behind the counter like a fuckin' chump at McDonald's, don't do this. It's not worth it. It just isn't worth it.

But Ibrahim wasn't an angel and jumbo wasn't, either.

Sometimes, Rock felt like one. Just fallen, still flexing his bleeding stumps where the wings were supposed to be.

I liked his hands on my shoulders. I liked his body close. I liked his chest when it came up against my back.

"But it was always in the background, Revy. All that evil. I know I was just being delusional. I know I was just lying to myself. What do these whores have to do every night to stay alive? What does everybody do in this city?

"It's the city of the damned. It's the fucking City of Dis. The whole world is. We like to pretend you can wall us off, we're some kind of- of special outlaws and renegades, but we know that's a lie. Everybody's rotten.

"Inside, everybody's the same. They're all rotten. They're all rotten, Revy. I'm rotten inside-"

"Jesus Christ, Rock, what the fuck are you talking about?"

"What good have I ever done? I've been lying to myself. Thinking, you know, I- I don't do really evil things, so that's great, right? When you're living in a toilet, not touching the turds makes you clean, right?"

I laughed. Laughed because I loved the image. 'cause I could see it.

It was hot. Hotter than hot. You get used to it, but there're times when you start noticing it again. A brutal heatwave when the usual cool wind floating off the water turns to steam and the fans sound and feel like slow creaking rusty death and even the air-conditioning's just turning shit tepid, when you're drowning in sweat.

But this was knowing there was his heat against me.

His scent. I didn't know what it was. Cheap cigarettes and weird clean smells of sweat with soap and his fruity shampoo and conditioner and just his hair and all of it was like spring and I thought: Now's the time to do it, right? Aren't you going to say something perfectly cliché like, We're all animals, Revy, so let's act like it?

But he didn't.

"But I'm dirty. I'm so dirty. Ignorant. I'm fallen. I'm damned, too."

"Yeah." I reached up. I felt something weird boil in my gut. Fear. Anxiety. Like reaching out to touch a skittish street dog and it might let you pet it or it might snarl and bristle and snap its jaws around your wrist or it might scrabble away and I didn't know which.

I could take getting bitten.

It was the running that'd kill me.

He didn't flinch when I touched his wrist. His fingers. Naked skin on skin.

"Yeah. We're all damned. Smiling devils dancin' in the dark, Rock. Evil skeletons with big forever grins. You hear my bones going _clink_ like ice in a glass of gin?"

He said nothing for awhile.

I listened to him breathe.

"I want to kill somebody, Revy." Jesus, that wasn't what I wanted to hear.

I wanted to hear, Revy, let's kiss. Let's touch. Let's fuck. Let's swap some nice sweet juices and I've seen you _kinda_ topless so how about you-

"Wait, what?"

"I wanna kill somebody, Revy. I wanna do it. I wanna kill someone. God- I'll never be worthy of God's forgiveness, anyway."

"Jesus Christ, Rock-"

"Exactly. You're not a Christian. You don't get it." So I jerked away from him. Hit him on the mouth. Not gentle this time.

"You don't fuckin' know me. You don't know how goddamned many times I sat around in my room, praying my guts out to Jesus and Mary and God and whoever the fuck else would listen, Rock. You don't getta fuckin' tell me what I am." I didn't think I'd knock him on his ass.

Blood raw red looked black on his chin.

"You don't fuckin' tell me what I am, Rock."

"Are you a Christian, Revy?"

"No. I'm a fuckin' nothin'. That's what I am. That's what life does. But I tried to be once. Old Ibrahim, back in my old neighborhood, he was a Muslim and all them Muslims are fuckin' Christ-fiends or something. He gave me my first bible and told me about heaven and all that stuff.

"He knew a lot. He told me I should take another path. He was a good fuckin' guy. You know what it's like to fall out of heaven, Rock, right? Well, I fell outta heaven, and Ibrahim was an angel who kept helping.

"He got me in touch with my first smuggling shit. The first rung. He hated it. It hurt him. I couldn't turn back. You can't turn back once you start. You think it's something you just give up on, y'know, kick like a junk habit?

"You ever try quittin' smoking, Rock? It's fuckin' impossible. 'cause you know what it's like to light up first thing in the morning. You ever try to quit a junk habit? It's fuckin' impossible, 'cause you know what the gong feels like when it's bein' rung.

"You think you can start bein' a virgin again? You can't turn knowing back into unknowing. So shut the fuck up-"

"Watch the tape, then, Revy. Watch the fucking tape and tell me. Tell me the- the... There aren't words. There aren't fucking words for the people who made that. Okay?"

"You want to watch it with me?"

"I've already watched it three times. What's one more time?"

So I pulled it out of the VCR. Slapped it into mine and rewound it and sat down with Rock.

Right away, I knew there was somethin' wrong with it. It was the shitty way it was filmed, for one, all this _cinéma vérité_ crap but no pretension or shit. Nobody's name on the credits. And then you couldn't see anybody's face.

It was in Roanapur. You could tell that from the streets hit you through the grainy camerawork like looking through a bottle of stale Budweiser. Clattering heels and shuffling shoes and old peasants out from the sticks with bundles of shit on their shoulders, big bamboo sticks slung between their hooked wrists, lazy hanged men jerking around like marionettes with pantomime life.

Junkies on the street and the usual swaggering fatass pigs and scrawny punks and whores and more bars per square mile than anywhere else outside of Bourbon Street and a steamy hot sweat-dripping ugliness and corrugated metal everywhere and shutters slammed shut on broken windows or wide casements and old clattering cars and the usual shit.

And then they're coming up behind this little girl. Six, seven. It's pretty clear where it's goin'.

I didn't wanna watch it. But Rock was there, looking like he was gonna swallow his own head, so I did. Watching them whip a hood on her head, all the silky black hair and brown skin vanishing. Screams strangled.

I could smell the inside of that hood. All the blood and tears and stale breath and horror and sweat and her arms were kicking and it didn't matter. And then the movie cut out and then it was coming back on, the girl dangling like a dead kitten off some big shirtless motherfucker's shoulder and all of them were big and built and naked except for these spooky fuckin' masks.

One of those nondescript warehouses they got everywhere and there's rusty old water and black grease dripping down the walls and it looks cold and scary and there are big rips scarring the walls and you can see the moon leaking down. You can't hear shit from outside but big kliegs come on and the spooky fuckers are hard.

The girl's shivering and the hood comes off and they go at her like starved dogs. Oversized cocks in an undersized girl while she's groaning and whimpering and bleeding when they belt her across the face, twist knives and needles and shit into her, and it keeps fucking going on and there's still the porno shit, still the goddamned moneyshots like anybody who's watching this is doing it to jerk off, and they won't stop.

Won't fucking stop 'til her guts are coming out, 'til there's shit and piss and tears and blood everywhere in the warehouse. Seventy fuckin' minutes and the tape clicks _stop_ and Rock's staring with big blank eyes at the screen.

I wish I could say I've never seen shit like that before.

"Let's kill the people who made this, Revy. Let's- let's kill them. Let's kill _all_ of them. I mean, you- you can ask Balalaika, or that- that guy with the afro. They'll know. They'll fucking _know_-"

"Christ, Rock. I already know who they are." Yeah. I did. I knew the tattoo on one of 'em, at least. Everybody knew that fuckin' tattoo.

"What the fuck are you talking about, Revy?"

"I know who it is. It's nasty shit." It was worse than that. I knew that. But I wanted him off this fuckin' kick. "Come on. Let's get hammered and you'll forget about it-"

"Tell me who, Revy. Tell me who it is."

"It don't matter, okay?"

"What? Are they protected?" Matter of fact, no, they weren't protected. It was seriously goddamn dumb for those pedo fuckers to do shit like this.

"How'd you get this movie, Rock?"

"I- I bought it from this street pusher. He kept telling me it was some amazing stuff. I thought it was just- I mean, I thought it was just porn or something."

"This is porn-"

"You know what I'm talking about, Revy. Something- something even normal people might jerk off to." The fuck did normality mean?

"Normality? Fuck, Rock, you don't think the guy they made this for looks normal? He don't have fangs and horns. He's probably a family man, a rich guy, comes to Thailand to do his dirty shit. A rich Jap or chink or Yankee or whatever.

"He's probably a banker or somethin'. This shit takes money to make. Who had it?"

"Dewey on Sai and Siam." That underfed little darkie half-breed. He looked like a black kid but had the smoothest slicked-down black hair and most annoying whiny Thai engrish I'd ever heard in my goddamned life.

"Dewey ain't in that business. Christ. Somebody musta sold it to him. Probably jacked it from a tourist or somebody's hotel room. Fuck." What was I supposed to tell Rock?

Forget about it?

"People suffer and die, Rock. It's just-"

"You of all people shouldn't tell me that stupid way of the world shit, Revy." I felt my blood burn at that. But he was right.

"Fine. What? You wanna pop your murder cherry, Rock? Waste it on these pieces'a shit-"

"Don't psychobabble me. I'll just ask Dutch. He'll know." Yeah. And Dutch wouldn't give a ten-billionth of a shit about whether Rock whacked those fuckers or not. They weren't under anybody's shadow, didn't have anybody's stamp on their asses.

If they got cold, the only people who'd bitch would be the meatwagon drivers.

So I sat there. If Rock asked Dutch, Rock'd hafta do it alone. I could take the chance he'd cool off by that point and not do anything stupid. But I knew people had a way of stewing in this shit and it could turn into obsession and madness.

"Rock, I'm kinda begging you here, okay? Let's- let's..." Let's fuck. Let's kiss. Let's go for a walk. Let's get hammered. Let's get high. Let's go shooting and you can blast some bottles. "Let's do something else.

"Okay? Let's do something else-"

"No." But I knew when I heard the word come out of his lips it wasn't gonna be. Not that whisper. It sounded cold and dusty like a tomb in some place under the sands so old the people who forgot it the first time had been forgotten.

"Rock, it's-"

"I'll do it with you, or without you."

So he could do it with me. Call it couple's bonding. Call it being the good responsible grownup popping his cherry or whatever.

But I knew where the fuckers'd be. There was more than one kiddie club and too fuckin' bad they worked with the reds' and the chinks' and the wops' and spics' and everybody else's mordida, so fuck any hope of burning 'em to the ground.

Lagoon Company might've been the baddest meanest goddamned killers outside of the Ripoff Church, but it didn't mean we got to be Robin Hood. It was on Ivy Jade Street and it was the biggest and worst one. This decadent 1313 Mockingbird Lane shit, all skinny windows and high thin skeletal spires and it looked like something outta that _Beetlejuice_ movie but I didn't figure Lydia was old enough.

Little-girl hookers like their big sisters in the same leg-baring titty costumes but there weren't any titties. Some of 'em were overdressed like schoolgirls and they all wore caked-on makeup. You could see there was nothin' there in the eyes, crusts of fake-warm ice over black puddles into nothingness.

I didn't wanna look. Big crabbed track-lines like dead trees on their arms and legs and a lot of 'em had yellowed-out eyes with jaundice and some of 'em were already heavy drinkers and there were packs of howling tourist subhumans getting some twisted kicks, Hey, when you're in hell, why not act like one of the devils?

Rock had a gun. Christ if I didn't want him to give it to me, but it was one of the pieces I'd given him, and I guess he had a point it wasn't right just to take it away. An old Browning, and I guess he knew how to use it, 'cause he was carrying it condition one in his pants under his untucked shirt and jacket and I'd never seen him untucked.

He looked bad. And then even worse when we stepped through the doors and into the thudding bass and hard driving rhythm pounding off the high walls. It was a goddamned playpen by the Marquis de Sade. Even had kiddie waitresses with high pigtails and high heels stalking around in Playboy costumes and Christ I just wanted to open up on the motherfuckers owned the place right then.

But we didn't have the ammo, and, shit, it woulda been a real bad fuckin' idea. We were just there to find the fucker in the suffocating red-velvet hell. It was a haze of stale sweat and girls were whipping off clothes and mincing around on a stage and splitting apart their cold preteen pussies hairless and nothing there and bee-sting tits and the guy owned the place used to run a steam-and-cream promising nothin' but the best underaged in Vietnam.

Bao knew the fucker. Said he was one'a the only Americans he ever really wanted to grease.

Bao was right.

Fat fuckin' Beaver Cleaver-lookin' sumbitch, coke-bottle glasses and a huge gut and always the MC, sitting around with his white dress shirt undone and greasy bloated gut deserved to be immortalized in the Smithsonian flopping over his disgusting schoolboy pants.

Always with a herd of little girls slithering over him. One was going down on the Beav when we walked up.

Rock looked like he wanted to whip out his piece and give him some extra holes. I had to put a hand on Rock's shoulder to keep him from it.

"Beav, I'm lookin' for a guy owes me money." The place was drowning in a shade like old blood. Multicolored lights swirled prismatic off the ceiling.

"Oh?" Beav had a disgusting voice. Think of a toilet packed with seven days' diarrhea and piss and old puke and then mix in some peanut butter and you can start to hear it.

"Yeah. You owe me, Beav."

"Oh? Oh. Oh. Fuck, yeah. C'mon, baby. Swallow it all." Christ, that was disgusting, watching those piggy eyes over his big alchie dick-nose and rubbery lips go glassy when he came. A little girl surfacing from the sick, wiping a thin thread of jizz off her lips.

She didn't say or do shit else.

"And put your goddamn dick back in your pants, ya fuckin' diaper-sniper."

"You kiss your mama with them lips, Revy?"

"I dunno. You fuck your mama up the ass with that little bobbin?"

"What do you want?"

"Jimmy O'Keefe."

"That fuckin' welsher? I don't give a Christ what you do with th'fucker. If it's 'bout beatin' a marker outta his mick ass or just whackin' him, do it with my fuckin' blessings."

"I don't need your blessings, Beav. Just tell me where he is."

"I dunno what it is, but him and his fuckers got real scarce an' missed a big payment they's owin' me. Some guy I know heard one'a his fuckers braggin' 'bout how they're gonna git this big payment jus' last week but it don't come in.

"Down at th'Rising Dawn motel. If yer gonna whack him, tell that fucker I'm through with him an' I hope he goes to hell."

"I thought you didn't wanna see him again." I was proud of Rock when I heard that. Beav didn't say shit. Just swiveled his beady eyes in those puffy lard pits up at Rock and squinted.

"Let's go, Rock." Rock looked like he wanted to burn down the place.

So did I.

Rising Dawn Motel's a shithole and good for us it wasn't in anybody's territory. Musta been the reason the dumb motherfuckers were hidin' out there. I had a pretty good idea of what the problem was, too. The fuckers pay for those tapes pay good money, and if they lost it, they were fucked.

They're also the kinda people who don't like hearing, Oh, sorry, but it got lost in the mail.

It was a grimy walk-up kinda deal like some Midwest hot-sheet joint, all the doors on the outside, open-air walkways with drunk party-boys and girls upending the night's revelry in big brown puddles all over the cement floors and off the balconies.

It wasn't hard to find where they were. Slip a buck to the little old lady pushing around a mop, the crone with the eyes you could blindfold with some floss and the hunched back and dirty apron, and she'll tell you anything.

There was a pool. Deep pit with peeling blue paint and filthy streaks from coordinated puke-and-shitfests. Christ knew why it was there, 'cause I never remembered it being filled, and it was piled with garbage. Human and everything else. Four stupid college kids doubled over and hurling out their guts with loud howls like sobbing children.

For another twenty bucks, the crone gave me her key, told me about the big white American, they no want no service, they ver' rude, no pay nothing, no pay owna, he get pissed he say they out on they ass next week they no pay nothing.

It was on the second floor. Third goddamn mistake after not paying the help and just existing. Room 209 and Rock was there behind me, eyes raw and red in the cold sizzling blue fluorescent lights _ting-ting-ting_ing in their half-broke fixtures boiling black with mosquitoes. Stepped around puking college brats and other dumbshits with stupid cow eyes gawking at my Cutlasses in their shoulder rigs like they'd never seen a heavily-armed woman with big tits in a black undershirt and Daisy Dukes and maroon hair before and we hit 209 after what was about thirty-nine hours and maybe five seconds.

Rock behind me.

"We can just walk away, y'know, Rock. They're in the shit now. If the management don't kill 'em, the Beav will get 'em, or a collector. Y'know the deal. Broken legs. Light bulbs shoved up their asses and broke-"

"But it won't be for the right reasons, Revy." His voice sounded like it had real iron in it.

"'s your reasoning?"

"It's my reasoning."

"Okay." So I whipped out my Cutlasses. Clicked back the hammers and put on my best little old maid come-on. "Ah, herro, need crean loom now-"

"Listen, bitch. I told you an' the old fuckin' cunt before we don't need no room-cleanin'. I'm with a real important client, okay, so step the fuck off before I shove my foot up your ass." I had to keep the demoness out of my face.

But it was fuckin' worthless. My blood was up and that meant it ran cold and maybe I was worried it'd be contagious like some kinda monster miasma but who fuckin' cared anymore.

"Get the door, Rock." Whispered it. Rock did. Slid the key in the lock. _Clunk_. It was loud. Snapped at the knob and the door was opening and straining at its chain. Fuckin' figured. Too fuckin' bad for those motherfuckers they were too goddamn dumb to know none of the shit in this place or most others was exactly up to code.

You didn't even need a battering ram or a shotgun. Just a solid kick with my jungle boots and the door was flapping on its hinges when the chain gave with a _clang_ and there was a big fuckin' chorus of confused _what the fuck's that holy shit goddamn oh no wait is that you, Revy-_

"Goddamn right, motherfuckers." Stepped in, Cutlasses up. Two degenerates standing around the door were just a little too close and they got one-way trips to the big kindergarten in the sky. Sounded deep and guttural in the room and goddamn it was beautiful. Hollow-points copper tulips in their heads and coming out the other side with exit wounds you coulda tossed a house cat through.

They hit the floor wet dead meat and there were three of 'em left with some suit who'd gone from arrogant and arch to pants-pissing horrified in the second between seeing me and hearing the bodies kiss the carpet you couldn't bleach enough to get me to touch with bare skin, pebbled and flat and looking like somebody'd taken a lawnmower to it.

The walls were yellowed with millennia of bad cigarette and weed smoke and it reeked like a locker room somebody was usin' as a brothel and the lights were sickening and dim and it was all sallow like a frosted smoky 'seventies drinking glass.

Blood and brain red and black and all the fuckers had the jeans and wife-beaters and shaved-headed look all the skinhead retards were rocking and Jimmy O'Keefe was the only one I knew by name 'cause he was the leader of the little baby-rape-and-murder operation and he was infamous for it.

The suit was a weedy European with stick arms and legs and a pencil neck and he looked like an accountant with a too-good black suit and he had stupid big milky blue eyes and a hairline by Agent Orange and Christ you knew this was the kinda motherfucker got off on this shit.

Probably drove at least a Lexus or a Benz and was a good husband to a bored wife looked too good to be standing in the same neighborhood and had a big house.

I'd already made him. 'cause I'd put down too many of that kinda fucker in my time.

"W-wait, I'm- I'm not part of this, okay?" He had a big designer bag in leather on the floor at his feet and they'd all been sitting around a table in the middle of the room like some important fuckin' powwow, shitty uncomfortable chairs didn't even match. There were two beds and the bedspreads looked like you'd wanna test 'em for ebola and they were patchworks of cum stains and blood and puke with some worn floral print between 'em.

"Oh, no? Oh, by all means. Why don't you just get up and leave, then?" Shit. He really did.

That was when Rock whipped out his Browning and held it in a hand was pretty steady for his first time.

"Sit down." I liked how Rock sounded. It was, fuck, it was real sick and short-sighted, and it meant all those sweet picket-fence fantasies I'd had were gonna die like these assholes, but I was the kinda girl who didn't have good impulse control.

That's what that bitch social worker told me.

"W-waitaminute-"

"Listen, fuckface. Lemme do the guessin' an' you can piss yerself to say, Yes, or, Double yes, huh? You're gonna buy a kiddie-rape-snuff movie from these fuckers, and they're gonna ask for, oh..." Looked down at the briefcase. "Fifty, sixty grand, and you think it's a steal, right?

"'cause them movies run you at least a hundred or five hundred everywhere else, right?" The guy did the impossible and turned whiter'n he already was.

I think he was English, maybe.

Whatever.

Dead bodies all look the same in the heat.

"That- that's-"

"Save it, fuckface. I know these assholes. So does my partner here. We found one'a your movies-"

"Jesus fuckin' Christ." O'Keefe was a goddamned moron. Looked like he was like to get his indignation up over it. "That movie cost me a hunnert fuckin' grand-"

Rock shot him. It was, well, Jesus, it was beautiful. I mean, it caught me by surprise. Even _me_. Rock just pulled the trigger and the gun sounded a helluva lot louder than mine and the flash blinked in my eyes and then there was a _ping_ with the casing pinballing off the wall leaking sweet-smelling smoke like a lounge in hell and O'Keefe had his arms around his broken belly.

His guts were coming out, pink and plasticky, when Rock pulled the trigger again. And again. And again. Mulched O'Keefe's arms and sent him toppling back like flicking over a frilly little umbrella in your drink on some nice beach with poor little Yukio and jumbo in another time when they weren't so goddamn stupid and his body hit the floor and he was pissing and shitting himself like a roadkilled cat.

And then Rock had the Browning in a good shooter's grip, swinging the sights over a bald motherfucker's head and the shot chiseled deep between the eyes and punched down everything and sent it imploding in a spray of fluid-filled cavities and shit and the brains were coming out and squelching on the floor.

I shot the other one. Figured I owed myself the fun.

And now there was just the Brit.

"J-Jesus fucking- please, please, I can pay you."

"Pay me?" Rock looked like the fuckin' reaper. I liked it. I was in love. I wanted to be the devil over his left shoulder whispering, _Do it do it do it do it_ but I didn't hafta. "Pay me? Take your money and let you go?

"I'm a pirate, you bastard." But Rock was sitting down. Pulled out a chair and flipped it around and straddled the back, pistol still giving off a few strings of smoke from its snout. "I'm a pirate and I'm a killer.

"Why do you want to see a little girl being raped and torn apart?"

"I- I don't. I don't. I- I didn't know-"

"Don't lie to me." The lie was pretty fuckin' pathetic.

"I have a family. Please."

"A child?" I could see where Rock was goin'. I liked it. "A little girl, maybe? Or a big girl? What about a wife? You're wearing a wedding ring." Rock always did have an eye for detail. His voice was flat and lucid.

"Yes. Yes-"

"Mmm. You should have thought of that before doing this, I guess. But I'll be nice. Tonight." The fuck was he doin'? "I'll let you leave. Just leave the briefcase."

"Thank- thank you. Thank you." The guy was getting up. The fuck was Rock doing? But I didn't say shit.

Maybe I was surprised. But I was waitin' to see where this was going.

"What do you think you're doing?" Rock walked out the door behind the guy. And then I was behind him, just watching.

"What?"

"I told you you could leave. But I didn't say you could use the stairs." _This_, I liked. Under the balcony was the big cement crater used to be a swimming pool. And now it was a drowning pool of shit and puke and broken glass and twisted iron debris looked like a dead rotten metal whale.

"W-what-"

"Off. Off the balcony. Or I'll just shoot you here." The balcony was clear. Even drunk off their ass dumbfuck college kids and partiers knew the fun was over when you heard people gettin' some extra holes added with nines.

"P-please, please, please, don't-"

"I told you. You have two options. Neither of them is very good, is it? But that's life. Sometimes, you don't get to choose good choices. I didn't get a good choice." Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. "See, you had- you had the luxury of very good choices.

"You had the luxury of time. Space. Wealth. But it's all gone and now you've got two terrible ones because I have the power now. So you go over the balcony or I shoot you."

Stupid fucker shoulda known it'd be worse to go over the balcony. But he did. Maybe he thought he'd do somethin' else, maybe thought he could fly, who knows what a man eaten alive by horror is gonna think, but one of his six-grand Italian loafers slipped and he was taking a gainer into the garden of thorns down there with a wet sickening crunch and crackle with the leg of an old rusty lawn chair coming out of his chest.

I could hear the wheezing. The legs were kicking and there was suffering in the stupid eyes going darker and darker.

It was fuckin' beautiful.

Rock just slammed his pistol back in his waistband, turned, and we were gone.

He didn't say anything for a real long time 'til we were almost back in the neighborhood with all the hookers on the prowl, long legs and high rubber boots and belt skirts and tits coming out of their ratty tops.

And then he talked.

"I don't really feel anything." His voice had a dry faraway sound in it, like he'd just gone into his first R-rated movie and didn't know what to expect, but it wasn't that.

"Yeah."


End file.
